Link Relation Types for Simple Version Navigation between Web Resources

Abstract

This specification defines a set of link relation types that may be used on Web resources for navigation between a resource and other resources related to version control, such as past versions and working copies.

Status of This Memo

This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is published for informational purposes.

This document is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It represents the consensus of the IETF community. It has received public review and has been approved for publication by the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG). Not all documents approved by the IESG are a candidate for any level of Internet Standard; see Section 2 of RFC 5741.

Copyright Notice

Copyright (c) 2010 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved.

This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License.

This specification defines a set of link relation types that may be used on Web resources that exist in a system that supports versioning to navigate among the different resources available, such as past versions and working copies.

These link relations are used in the AtomPub ([RFC5023]) bindings of the "Content Management Interoperability Services" (CMIS). See Section 3.4.3.3 of [CMIS] for further information.

When a resource is put under version control, it becomes a "versioned resource". Many servers protect versioned resources from modifications by considering them "checked in", and by requiring a "checkout" operation before modification, and a "checkin" operation to get back to the "checked-in" state. Other servers allow modification, in which case the checkout/checkin operation may happen implicitly.

Version History

A "version history" resource is a resource that contains all the versions of a particular versioned resource.

Predecessor, Successor

When a versioned resource is checked out and then subsequently checked in, the version that was checked out becomes a "predecessor" of the version created by the checkin. A client can specify multiple predecessors for a new version if the new version is logically a merge of those predecessors. The inverse of the predecessor relation is the "successor" relation. Therefore, if X is a predecessor of Y, then Y is a successor of X.

Working Copy

A "working copy" is a resource at a server-defined URL that can be used to create a new version of a versioned resource.

Checkout

A "checkout" is an operation on a versioned resource that creates a working copy, or changes the versioned resource to be a working copy as well ("in-place versioning").

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RFC 5829 Version Navigation Link Relations April 2010

Checkin

A "checkin" is an operation on a working copy that creates a new version of its corresponding versioned resource.

Note: the operations for putting a resource under version control and for checking in and checking out depend on the protocol in use and are beyond the scope of this document; see [CMIS], [RFC3253], and [JSR-283] for examples.

When included on a versioned resource, this link points to a resource containing the latest (e.g., current) version.

The latest version is defined by the system. For linear versioning systems, this is probably the latest version by timestamp. For systems that support branching, there will be multiple latest versions, one for each branch in the version history.

Automated agents should take care when these relations cross administrative domains (e.g., the URI has a different authority than the current document). Such agents should also take care to detect circular references.

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RFC 5829 Version Navigation Link Relations April 2010

Care should be applied when versioned resources are subject to differing access policies. In this case, exposing links may leak information even if the linked resource itself is properly secured. In particular, the syntax of the link target could expose sensitive information (see Section 16.2 of [RFC3253] for a similar consideration in WebDAV Versioning). Note that this applies to exposing link metadata in general, not only to links related to versioning.

The link relations defined in Section 3 correspond to various properties used in WebDAV Versioning [RFC3253] and JCR [JSR-283]:

version-history

WebDAV: the resource identified by the DAV:version-history property ([RFC3253], Sections 5.2.1 and 5.3.1).

JCR: the node identified by jcr:versionHistory property ([JSR-283], Section 3.13.2.4) for versionable nodes, the parent folder for version nodes.

latest-version

WebDAV: for version-controlled resources, DAV:checked-in ([RFC3253], Section 3.2.1) or DAV:checked-out ([RFC3253], Section 3.3.1), depending on checkin state. For version resources, a successor version that itself does not have any successors.

JCR: the version node identified by the jcr:baseVersion property ([JSR-283], Section 3.13.2.5) for versionable nodes; for version nodes, a successor version that itself does not have any successors.

working-copy

WebDAV: for version-controlled resources that are checked-out in place: the resource itself. For version resources: each resource identified by a member of the DAV:checkout-set property (see [RFC3253], Section 3.4.3).

The "Web Linking" specification ([WEB-LINKING]) generalizes Atom link relations, and also reintroduces the HTTP "Link" header as a way to expose link relations in HTTP responses. This will make it possible to expose version links independently from a specific vocabulary, be it the Atom Feed Format ([RFC4287]) or WebDAV properties ([RFC3253]).

For instance, a response to a VERSION-CONTROL request ([RFC3253],Section 3.5) could expose a newly created version-history and checked-in version as link relations: